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Hillary and Me

Politicians (and their families) ignore us all the time and still get elected. But the campaign’s communication flaws were really just an extension of a deeper disorganization and internal confusion that even the least experienced reporter on her plane could see. It wasn’t her ill-fated decision to compete in Iowa—the caucuses that would vault Barack Obama into history—that was fatal. It was how hard she ran. This was a mad dash, not the strategic marathon run by the Obamaians; the biggest problems didn’t seem to be political, but logistical.

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Clinton insisted on scheduling one or two more events per day than Obama did in an attempt, we assumed, to prove her earnestness and work ethic. That may seem like a minor matter but reporters—even the non-whiny ones—began to feel like hostages, especially compared with the Obama embeds who seemed fat, happy, healthy and well rested by comparison.

Daily campaign journalism isn’t exactly God’s work, and Clinton’s bruising schedule exacerbated our collective gotcha impulse. I quickly learned to rest through her first few appearances—when she was disgorging her talking points—to be wide awake for later events when a tired Clinton was more prone to embellish, improvise and err. She often obliged. In late December 2007, I was standing in the back of a last-event-of-the-day Clinton rally in Dubuque when she related the tale of her 1995 “corkscrew” landing in Bosnia under sniper fire. After Clinton was done speaking, I joined two of my best friends on the bus, Matt Stearns and Mike McAuliff, to fact-check the anecdote in a copy of Clinton’s memoir borrowed from a nearby retiree who was waiting in line to have her book autographed. There was no mention of snipers in her account of the incident—just details of a goodwill mission with baggy-pants comedian Sinbad, singer Sheryl Crow and Chelsea. We wrote it up, it popped nationally and the episode became a low-grade, lingering embarrassment for the campaign until Clinton conceded three months later that she had been “sleep deprived” and had misremembered.

It wasn’t any innate hostility to Clinton that soured her relationship with the press. It was the pointlessness of so much of what she did in those early months and the strain of fighting her flacks and the schedule each day. I remember watching a usually stoic Secret Service agent cursing Clinton on the tarmac in Milwaukee when she ordered the campaign’s rattletrap 737 to fly up into a blizzard, knowing we’d have to turn back, just so she could say she’d attempted to fly to a rally in Madison.

The gesture was meaningless. She lost Wisconsin by 17 points a few days later.

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Prior to the 2008 race Clinton told me, presciently as it turned out, that presidential elections were unpredictable because opponents “attacked your strengths,” not just your weaknesses. Obama got in her head because he challenged her bedrock narrative—that she was a war-averse child of the Vietnam era, that she was at the vanguard of her party’s commitment to racial equality, that she was the standard-bearer for hope and change. That is far less likely to happen in 2016.

And truth be told, the process of writing about Clinton was different, and better, in 2014. When our story ran, we heard some of the expected grousing, but it was more generic, Obama-level bellyaching—and the criticism tended to be more constructive.

Our piece appeared in a relative doldrums, just days before House Republicans re-lit the Benghazi bonfires, Monica broke her “silence” and press speculation about Clinton’s new memoirs heated up. As the media circus starts setting up its tents ahead of the book’s rollout next month, alot of attention will be paid to Clinton’s opening moves, whether she’ll be more or less accessible to the press, what she’ll write about Benghazi and how she’ll define her life’s “narrative”—whatever that means.

But if 2008 taught me anything, it’s that mood is more important than modus operandi: How will Clinton react when things go south? Will she shrug off the hits—or go to the dark place?

She’s a lot more appealing in the light.

A couple of months before the Clear Lake, Iowa, flight, I was covering her speech at a Democratic dinner in Little Rock, an ambivalent homecoming to a state that had decidedly mixed feelings about the Clintons. As I followed her progress on the rope line after the speech, my wife called with alarming news: My four-year-old son had spiked a fever and suffered a seizure, flopping unconscious onto the floor. A Clinton aide noticed something was wrong and asked me what had happened—followed by Clinton, who wanted to know the details.

A few minutes later, the staffer came back. “The senator says you can fly back east with us on the plane if you need to,” she said.

I didn’t take Clinton up on the offer—my son quickly recovered—and I didn’t think it would have been appropriate anyway. But the moment has stuck in my mind, and done as much to shape my perception of Clinton as all the cold shoulders, hard feelings and hard landings on ice. It was spontaneous and generous, a glimpse at the “Real Hillary” her staff so adores—and reporters so seldom see.